A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Wet Silence – The Poetry of Widowhood

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wet silence - sweta vikramHow many ways can you write about widowhood? In Wet Silence: Poems about Hindu Widows, Sweta Srivastava Vikram explores every nuance of what life is like for a Hindu widow in India. It’s as much a human exploration as a cultural one as Vikram delves into the aftermath of the complex relationships that underlie arranged marriages. Some of the widows in this collection are devastated that their beloved husbands have passed. Others rejoice in their new freedom from abuse and adultery. Still others face new complications in their relationships with the families to which they have now become burdensome.

Marriage in India

Indian marriages are still predominantly arranged by the families of the bride and groom. Although there’s an increasing trend toward the couple having a say in the choice, that is not always the case. The result is sometimes a lasting bond where two people come to know and love each other inside a marriage they have been committed to by their families and culture, and sometimes the result is a very unhappy couple who cannot face the shame of divorce (which carries a much deeper burden of stigma than in the US).

Wet Silence explores the aftermath of both types of marriages from the “rum handprints” of “Wet Silence” to the “touch gentle as velvet” of “My Husband is Leaving”. We also meet servant girls others who lost lovers not strictly their husbands.

I water my memory of you—
it is all I have of youalong with your empty words
in the home we never built
where the mosquitoes feast on my skin.
– Sweta Vikram, “I Water My Memory of You”

Indian Widows

Visiting India last fall, it was easy to spot the widows (at least those who adhered to tradition). In a country full of bright colors, they wear white. They no longer wear jewelry or red vermilion (one of the signs of a married woman) in the parts of their hair. And their heads are sometimes shaven. They eat a restricted diet and are considered burdens to their families and bad luck to the world at large.

This removal of all that is feminine says a lot about the status of women in India and Wet Silence takes the reader inside that restricted world on an intimate level. Each poem contains a first person narrative by a widow and the book as a whole is the result of a series of interviews Vikram conducted with Indian widows.

Clarity vs. Abstraction of Language

In Great With Child, Beth Ann Fennelly recounts some writing advice she received where a poet told her about a city that experimented with blue taxis that had a more expensive fare but took you straight to your destination and red taxis with a cheaper fare that meandered. “Take the red taxi” he advised her about her poetry. The degree of directness is a choice every poet, really every writer, must make for themselves. One of my favorite moments of abstraction in Vikram’s poetry is in the poem “Pretense”:

When I hear belts unbuckle,
I say your name to taste you.
The sound cuts
through my brown flesh,
I become wounded again.

The abuse this woman must have suffered is present in the poem, but lingers perfectly in the background where we as readers can fill in our own details. Overall in Wet Silence, Vikram takes a more blue taxi approach—giving us straightforward poems that allow insight into what is for most of us a foreign culture. But I sometimes wish she’d meandered more—found more of a way to reach into the feeling of these widows’ experiences to find the inexpressible. Easy for me to say, I strive to take the red taxi but most of the time feel like a veteran driver of the blue.

If you’re interested to know more about the lives of women in India and like more direct poetry, Wet Silence might be just the book for you. But if you’re looking for a transformative linguistic experience that still explores the Indian experience, I’d recommend Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene instead.

To get your own insight into the experience of widowhood in India, pick up a copy of Wet Silence, from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reading Heat and Dust in the Dusty Heat of India

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heat and dust - ruth prawer jhabvalaOne of the things I was most afraid of in coming to India was replicating the colonial experience. This frightened me because I despise the exploitation of other peoples and cultures and I thought with my oh-so-white skin and complete lack of skill with local languages and norms that I could not avoid being seen as one of those colonizers who expects to be treated as more and better. It also frightened me because I thought I might grow to like it.

As a result, and as I’ve mentioned before, I steered away from bringing along books written from the British perspective (although I’ve read many before). Except one. I brought along Booker Prize winning Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala even though the prize, the cover imagery, and the jacket description all suggested it was England-approved. But the book was thin and I read so few prize-winning books (usually by choice) and I thought I’d muddle through whatever elitist whatnot the book might offer.

I’m so glad I was wrong.

Two Perspectives on India

Although there is one storyline in this book about a bored British housewife, Olivia, in 1923 India, it’s complemented perfectly by the story of Olivia’s step-granddaughter who visits a very different India in the 1970s to uncover the story of how and why Olivia ran away with an Indian royal.

Olivia’s story is actually a tale about a woman who’s questioning all the British convention she encounters as a newlywed who is first encountering British India. She doesn’t like the British society and she’s not afraid to act according to her own ideals. As much as I sometimes questioned her judgment—running off to spend all day nearly every day with a married Indian Nawab (I think this is a prince) without (and without telling) her husband—I admired her spirit—refusing to summer in Shimla just because that’s what the British ladies were expected to do.

As Olivia’s story unfolds, so does that of her granddaughter and here is where Jhabvala displays real mastery, because the two women experience many similar events at similar points in the narrative (from festivals to intrusions of unwanted guests and more) which could become quite cloying. Instead, because Jhabvala has made these stories just different enough, the intersections feel mystical and preordained and as I was reading the book I kept wondering if these two generations would fall into the same trap.

India in Real Life

cows in india
My own perspective on India is much closer to Olivia’s granddaughter, in part because the India she encounters is much closer to the one I see during the day—the bustling emerging economy that’s making its own rules along the way, the street markets and roaming cows, the people who look as though they can repair anything (many things which an American would throw away), and the people who live in any spare space of traffic median they can find.

“For the first time I understood—I felt—the Hindu fear of pollution. I went home and bathed rigorously, rinsing myself over and over again. I was afraid. Pollution—infection—seemed everywhere; those flies could easily have carried it from her to me.” – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

I refuse to judge the country based on traffic that scares me and mounds of garbage swept to the side of the street. It is different, but it should be different, because there’d be no point in traveling all this way if it was the same. I will not drink the water or eat the street food, but there are over a billion people here who are making the country what they want it to be. Don’t we all have some level of pollution or other problem we want to fix?

But that is not all of India. As an American tourist in Jaipur, I am staying in a hotel that used to be the residence of the prime minister of Jaipur where I swim in a large pool overlooked by peacocks and where an enormous staff is employed to cater to any need I might have and then disappear. Olivia’s set, though likely not Olivia herself, would have been at their most comfortable here behind the walls that separate us from the city.

Last night we dined with a local family in their palace in the old town of Jaipur. They are relatives (distant I think) of the Maharajah and their ancestors moved into the home in the 1760s. Nestled deep inside one of the pink blocks of market stalls and small shops, this home with three luscious courtyards houses several brothers and their families along with five dogs and a tortoise. They live behind walls and glass thick enough to block out the market noise in rooms beautiful in their simplicity that are decorated with family artifacts like pictures of the Maharajah and the Mountbattens as well as the skins and heads of leopards and tigers (decor it seemed as though our gracious hosts would not have chosen for themselves, but here family artifacts and history matter).

Today we’ll go into the jungle at Rathambore to hunt tigers with our cameras. I didn’t bring any more books about tiger hunting, so I’ll be reading a spiritual text in preparation for our visit to Varanasi or maybe a detective novel set in Mumbai.

How India is Changing Me

“She began to write to Marcia, but Marcia was in Paris and it was impossible to explain anything from here to there.” – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

I’m not sure I’m doing a good job of conveying my experiences, partly because I’m still so far inside of them and things change every day, but I’ll try.

In Heat and Dust, Jhabvala writes, “India changes people,” and I’ve been reflecting on what that means for me. I am aware here of never feeling like I belong anywhere. I don’t know the streets well enough to wander then, and even if I did I’d be an object of curiosity. And the luxurious expat lifestyle (as much as I’m enjoying it) makes this democratic, do-it-yourself girl deeply uncomfortable.

Most of all I feel conspicuous. There are moments I’ve been able to own that feeling of being watched and to embrace what it means to be on display (including the long saunter to the pool where I take a brief swim and then lay and do nothing but be seen). But being in India is making me more and more conscious of how uncomfortable I am being seen whether as an object of curiosity or as a woman. I’m uncomfortable even writing about it here because of everything it implies. Now that India has helped me pinpoint some of the sources that discomfort, I can start to investigate what it all means.

And then there is the spiritual awakening aspect of India. I did not come here for a religious experience, though there are certainly years in my life that would have been my goal. Somerset Maugham wrote of his characters once that he was “a deeply religious man who doesn’t believe in God” and that’s been the case with me for a long time. I flirt with Buddhist philosophy, cross myself like a good little Catholic to ward off the evil eye, and am most at peace when I am subsumed by the power of sitting beneath a large sky in front of a vast ocean.

So when I walk into a temple or a mosque or a gurudwara and feel the immense energies of the places and of the people worshipping in them, I pay attention. I don’t know what is happening and I don’t plan on going home and beginning to worship Vishnu, but I am soaking up the Hindu idea that all gods are one and that we make of them what we individually need. I am attracted to the Sikh vision of equality. I’m even beginning to like the call of the muezzin who wakes us around 4:45 am because of the sincere love of faith embodied in his voice.

I can even feel India affecting my syntax and my gestures. As a mimic—a skill I think I developed to mask the feeling of not fitting in in the many places I’ve traveled—I’m very aware of these things (and have been fighting the change of syntax in this essay), but no amount of energy will allow me to resist those changes.

The one thing I am sure of is that I am not a colonial. At least not yet. So I’ll enjoy yet another sumptuous breakfast buffet where I can eat foods from all corners of the globe while the waiter brings me extra special treats. I’ll relish cool swims in pristine pools. But I will not stop wondering about the social cost of creating a service class or the environmental toll of this kind of tourism on a state with little water. The wheel of the world keeps spinning, but I am not yet ready to accept that “other” or “privileged” is a station I must embrace.

I’m grateful to you for reading along with me as I experience India through books and the windows of a tour bus. I never know when I’ll have access to internet again, so I’m posting these as I go. Sharing the journey with you in this form helps me better understand my days and nights, so thank you.

For other perspectives on what I read while in India, read my experiences of The Death of Vishnu and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall.

Navigating Diaspora in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, Kenya, and India

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in-between world of vikram lall - vassanjiHow many book reviews can I write about diaspora? Maybe a lot because the feeling of not knowing where or what home is is something I struggle with. So when I picked up The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by MG Vassanji as part of the great India book grab, thinking that because the author’s name sounded Indian, it must be about India, I was making an assumption that shows how much I want life to fit into identifiable little boxes. Instead, I found a story much more similar to my own life, a story of a man living away from his ancestral home and trying to figure out who that makes him.

Stateless in the World

“[M]y fantasy has partly to do with desperate need to belong to the land I was born in.” – MG Vassanji

It wouldn’t be fair to say that Vikram Lall’s life is actually like mine. This protagonist is a third generation Kenyan, but as the grandson of a man who came over from Punjab to help build the railroad, his ethnicity means he will never blend with his homeland. And because the Indian town his ancestors come from is ceded to Pakistan, there is no going “home” again. To add to that feeling of statelessness, the story is told from later in Vikram’s life when he is hiding out in Canada.

“Even now, here in this Canadian wilderness, I cannot help but say my namaskars, or salaams, to the icons I carry faithfully with me, not quite understanding what they mean to me.” – MG Vassanji

My ethnicity means that physically I blend in just fine with my home town in Idaho and my adopted home of Seattle. But my experiences living abroad have stretched and changed who I am in ways I cannot explain. As a result, I often feel like I don’t quite fit in Seattle (or in Chile or Poland or anywhere). And anyway, the Chile and Poland I knew are quite different I’m sure than what they are now even without accounting for the ways the act of remembering those places has shaped them in my mind.

“It has occurred to me—how can it not?—that my picture of the past could well have, like the stories of my grandfather, acquired the patina of nostalgia, become idealized. But then, I have to convince myself, perhaps a greater and conscious discipline and the practice of writing mitigate that danger.” – MG Vassanji

I don’t know what any of this means, really, to me or to you, but it does help explain why I keep reading about people who are shaped by more than one culture—in some ways it is inside those stories that I feel most at home. It also explains why I’m making notes for a memoir about how living abroad changed my life—research that’s much easier to do when I’m once again on foreign soil.

Reading Beyond the Colonists

You’d think that a book like Out of Africa might really do it for me then. Isak Dinesen was certainly stateless as she farmed in Kenya. But there’s something about the colonial spirit that I can never get inside of or fully enjoy. In fact, as I prepared the great India reading list, I did everything I could to balance out the British take on India like Far Pavilions and A Passage to India that I’ve read so much of before.

One of the great pleasures, then of reading The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is that while it starts out in British Kenya, it is not from the point of view of a colonist. Nor is it anti-colonist, as the girl Vikram longs after for all of his life (a childhood friend) is British. But because Vikram is also close with a Kikuyu boy (who is a full, round character in ways that the Kikuyu in Out of Africa never quite achieve), I felt like I was getting a much fuller picture.

Traversing the History of Kenya

“[F]or Indians abroad in Africa, it has been said that it was poverty at home that pushed them across the ocean. That may be true, but surely there’s that wanderlust first, that itch in the sole, that hankering in the soul that puffs out the sails for a journey into the totally unknown” – MG Vassanji

Not only was I getting a diverse series of perspectives, but The In-Between World of Vikram Lall gives the reader glimpses into a wide span of Kenyan history. When we’re learning about Vikram’s grandfather, we may as well be reading Man Eaters of Tsavo alongside it with the insights into the building of the railroad. Then Vikram gets too close to the Mau Mau massacres of British citizens and later we get to read about Kenya under African rule.

Back to India

Although this book is not set in India, there is a certain longing for home culture on the part of Vikram and his family that gave me insight into Indian life. From the fact that most of the girls he’s attracted to have waist-long black braids to the power structure within a family, I feel like I learned a lot. The fact that I was reading about how Vikram’s family approached arranged marriage at the same time our tour guide was explaining arranged marriage only made both more interesting.

Jaipur India

I’m in Jaipur right now, a long way from Kenya and an even farther distance from home, but I’m having a good time stretching and growing as I learn about yet another culture. I guess if you’re going to be a citizen of the world, you might as well just dive in and itch the scratch on those soles.

For other perspectives on what I read while in India, read my experiences of Heat and Dust and The Death of Vishnu.

The Death of Vishnu and the Realities of Life in India

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manil suri - death of vishnuAs preparation for this trip to India that I’m on, I gathered as much Indian literature around me as I thought I might be able to carry. I planned to read the books along the journey and then to leave them or share them with other travelers on the way. But one book, The Death of Vishnu called me to read it before I even left for the US and I’m so glad I did.

The Quiet Death of Contemporary Literature

The reason I stopped reading most literary magazines and why I’m very careful about what books I spend my time on is a trend toward complete lifelessness in much contemporary fiction as one character (usually a thinly veiled stand in for the author) contemplates his or her navel as not much happens. It’s all meant to be portentous or something but usually the connections are only in the author’s mind and not the page and the readers are left flat.

The flooding of the literary market with these kinds of stories and books leaves me adrift in a sea where I’m looking for meaning in all this quiet contemplation (a state of being I deeply love) but because the meaning is not actually processed enough to be communicated, most contemporary quiet fiction makes me feel desperately lonely and disconnected from humanity.

The Death of Vishnu is the exact opposite of that experience. Instead, the story of an impoverished man dying on the steps of an apartment building as the building’s residents go about their daily lives is rich in social commentary, quotidian detail (of the informative type), mythological importance, and even humanity. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

Life in India

Mind you, I’ve been out of the enclave that houses the world’s embassies to Delhi for almost one full day, so everything I purport to know about real life in India is deeply flawed, but having read The Death of Vishnu before arriving, I feel like I understand everything better.

In The Death of Vishnu, the households of the apartment are supported by a range of people from the cigarette walla (who brings cigarettes) to the ganga (who brings milk) to Vishnu, the man who washes the families’ dishes. During the few days Vishnu is dying on the steps, we get to know two Hindu families (who are quarreling over such things as the amount of water they can pull from the kitchen they share), a Muslim family (whose son is carrying on a Romeo and Juliet type romance with the daughter of one of the Hindu families and whose father has been exploring enlightenment in other religions), an older man (who lives entirely wrapped in the memory of the woman he loved), and Vishnu (who may or may not be the reincarnation of the god Vishnu).

The details of life I encountered in this book, from the petty squabbles and keeping up with the Joneses of a ladies’ poker party to the way the ambulance system functions (where first the ambulance needs to be paid for and then the payment of resulting medical services guaranteed before the patient can even be removed from the premises) were astounding. I couldn’t believe the way the author packed so much life into so few days. And yes, the story overall is quiet with its petty squabbles and small joys, but the way the author fits the entirety of these characters’ lives into these few pages becomes an amazing reminder that all of these small things are the entirety of life for most of us, no matter where we live.

Halfway around the world from where I belong, I’m finding those small details of the lives of others completely fascinating. From the way the young, thin rickshaw driver pedaled my mom and me around a small section of Old Delhi yesterday—displaying an assuredness that showed how well he could navigate any system and made me imagine how he could (if he would want to) break out of what seemed to me to be a life of hand to mouth existence—to the ingenuity displayed by a group of young men when our bus was blocked into a tight curve by a car—they rocked the car to the point that it was moved out of the way—I feel like there is so much to learn from careful observation of life—both abroad and at home.

Yesterday I saw crazy amounts of wire strewn across tiny streets. I saw crowds of people gathered around watching us watching them. I saw couples on motorbikes and goats staked to the side of the road before they would be eaten. I also saw that this is a country in which things are still repaired rather than being replaced and how many people are employed to do a job that in the US we’d ask one to do. That last bit made me wonder if full employment, or at least the sharing out of some work, doesn’t make everyone happier because the responsibilities are shared and each person in the system is valued. I saw people begging on the streets and hawkers selling everything from washcloths to coconuts in traffic.

Making Meaning of it All

I don’t have the answers to what any of life here, or life in the US, means. And I don’t want to pretend here that I do. But one of the things I learned from reading The Death of Vishnu is that by providing enough pertinent detail, readers can make their own meaning. So when I think that life is missing from much contemporary fiction, maybe what I mean is that detail of experience is missing. Or that we’re so busy listing what’s in a character’s bedroom (a common writing prompt) that we fail to then let him experience life outside of that bedroom—something that would make all of those previous details have import.

Mythological Underpinnings

One thing the author of The Death of Vishnu relies on to add richness to this story is a relationship to the Bhagavad Gita a sacred Hindu text. And I feel like there are aspects of this book I would have cherished all the more if I were at all familiar with that text. But the author does a wonderful job of weaving in enough information that I could follow along, even if I missed a majority of the allusions. I miss this kind of writing, where one story is leveraged on another, older story. It’s something I tried to do in Polska, 1994 by tying aspects of Magda’s journey to moments in Christ’s life. I don’t think most readers will take that from my book, but for those who do, the meaning will be even greater.

On Being Vague in Book Reviews

You’ll notice I’ve named only one character here and not even the author. That’s the perils of being without my books. I made notes somewhere about all of those things so I’d have them with me, but it’s the middle of the night here and I’d probably wake my mom if I went looking for them. Oh, and I don’t have much internet access, so I’m forced to rely on the (not-so) trusty memory bank.

What I hope for you is that if you’re at all interested in life in India or if you want to know how to make a quiet story read loud, you’ll open this book and discover its characters and all the life therein for yourself. I promise it will be worth your time.

Leave of Absence

While I’m very glad that I read The Death of Vishnu in the US and have the book at home in my collection to read and re-read, I’m now back to reading the novels I had little enough confidence in that I thought I could leave them at home. If I get lucky and find enough joy in one of them (and an internet connection to boot), I’ll share them with you here. And if not, I’ll see you all in November. Thanks for sharing books, and the world, with me.

For other perspectives on what I read while in India, read my experiences of Heat and Dust and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall.

Exploring the Extraordinary with The Calcutta Chromosome

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the calcutta chromosome - amitav ghoshI started reading The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery by Amitav Ghosh because I’ll be traveling to India in just over a month. The book had been in my to-read pile for ages and I’d heard good things about it, I just wasn’t ready to read it… until now. And what I found in those pages made me glad I waited to read it, because if I had read this book at any other time, I would have missed what became the central lesson of the book for me: thinking beyond the expected.

Blowing Apart Genre

I have to admit, this book was really slow going for the first half. The first chapter feels like it describes a semi-dystopian future where Antar is scanning relics of the past. He soon recognizes an ID card of someone he once knew in India. Then we are plopped down in 1995 where a man named Murugan is on the trail of a British scientist from 100 years before (which felt like a nonfiction account of curing malaria). Then the story flashes to that scientist. Then we hear of another scientist at the same period (whose subplot feels like a mystery novel). And a writer (ghost story).

There are some connective threads between these stories–it’s not like I had no idea where we were going–but I soon found myself wondering why Ghosh strung these stories together. Each was interesting on its own, but I found the disconnection exhausting and couldn’t read more than one (short) chapter a night.

“You also have to remember that she wasn’t hampered by the sort of stuff that might slow down someone who was conventionally trained: she wasn’t carrying a shit-load of theory in her head, she didn’t have to write papers or construct proofs… She didn’t care about formal classifications… She was working toward something altogether different.” – Amitav Ghosh

Somewhere in the middle I saw those threads start to form a whole and I realized it was my expectation of this book that was standing in my way. I didn’t understand the genre because it was unlike any genre I’d read before. It was many genres woven together to form this one new way of telling a story that was perfect for this book. The mishmash was intentional and had I been more open to the novelty of experience, I might have seen what Ghosh was doing earlier. Either way, I’m glad I didn’t quit reading.

I absolutely will not tell you more about this book because I feel like the discovery is part of the joy. Just know that to best enjoy this book, I hope you will surrender to it earlier and with less fight than I did. Love it for what it is.

The Extraordinary in My Own Life

Bloom: I can’t wake up next to another stranger, who thinks they know me, or even wants to know me, cause I don’t know – who – I’m thirty five years old, and I, I’m useless, I’m crippled, I don’t, I’ve only ever lived life through these roles that aren’t me, that are written for me by you.
Stephen: Tell me what you want.
Bloom: Why? So you can write me a role in a story where I get it? You’re not listening to me. I want a real… thing, I wanna do things how I don’t know are gonna work out, a-I, want, a…
Stephen: You want an unwritten life.

In The Brothers Bloom (which happens to be one of my favorite movies), Bloom tells Stephen (his older brother who had been scripting cons for them throughout their lives) that what he wants most is an “unwritten life.” That phrase has stuck with me ever since 2008 when I first saw the movie, because it captured something I longed for so desperately but could never name.

My parents would tell you that I was always going to live life on my terms. Whether it was going to preschool in my grandmother’s pumps or the clown costume I frequently wore for years after that. My decision to become a teen rebel at 12 (something I turned right around to become conservative at 17, just when one group of friends was only starting to rebel). They wouldn’t know about the day I stood on an unremarkable street corner in Poland fingering the passport in my pocket and dreaming of running away to create a new, anonymous life in Paris. But they shook their heads and supported me when at 19 I decided I wanted to buy a house. So when I started my MFA in creative writing, I’m sure the only thing that would have surprised them is if I wasn’t surprising them.

But inside, where it counts, and in clutch moments where I feel like I have the choice to follow an extraordinary life, I feel like I panic and then fail. Part of my problem is that always being on the outside of expectations is exhausting. Part of it is that at times I find myself living in opposition to expectation rather than figuring out what I really want to do. And part of it is that deep in my heart I long to be normal, too. I want a husband and a house and a dog. I want to have kids and a beach house and to be able to afford all of it. But I still want that sense that I am following my own path.

This struggle has come into sharp relief lately when I’ve come to a place where, after a few years of just trying to make it day to day, I actually have some choices. I have a job that I can in many ways make whatever I want. I have a literary career that could possibly flourish if I don’t let it languish. I am married to an artist who understands how important it is to nourish that crazy burst of inspiration in my soul. And still I feel like I am failing myself.

I cannot tell you how many times recently someone has suggested that I could make a go of it as purely a novelist–kind people who would be thrilled to see me follow my dreams. And my answer is always that I can’t. Not because I don’t want to but because I don’t want the pressure. I want to write without having to worry about sales or what people think. And so I limit that dream because I know how much I need to be me, even if it’s in a private way that only I see.

But the pressure to be extraordinary on the outside–to make my own rules and just move–is building inside me.

What Happens Next

I don’t know what happens next. I leave for India–a country I’ve dreamed of but never thought I’d get to–in October. I will continue working to pay the mortgage on my house. I might even take a few risks and see how far I can actually stretch the definitions of that job. And I will go back to writing–the thing that nourishes me and I’ve neglected for far too long.

Perhaps at Sarnath I’ll have some Buddhist revelation. Or I’ll have a Lovecraftian moment that will change the entire future of the world. Whatever happens, I hope I have the strength to start to do things in my own way again and to love myself the way I am. Because I don’t know what an extraordinary life means to me yet, but I do know I’ll gladly settle for an unwritten one.

If you want to dig into this world, pick up a copy of The Calcutta Chromosome from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.